CentOS and Fedora as alternative OS's

[Chris Murphy]

On Feb 20, 2014, at 4:49 AM, Timothy Murphy <gayleard at eircom.net> wrote:

> I tried to install Fedora-20 as a second OS on my CentOS-6.5 server,
> purely as an experiment, but it was disastrously unsuccessful.

Be more specific?

> I used the same /boot partition for both,
> assuming that Fedora would use /boot/grub2/ while CentOS used /boot/grub/,
> so the two would not interfere with each other.
> I shared the same /home partition between the two OS's.

Sharing /boot in this case seems OK, because the two distributions use different file names for everything. But I'm skeptical that /home can successfully be shared. I'm pretty sure gnome2 on CentOS uses a different location for its files than gnome3 on Fedora 20, but if they don't, then gnome3 will update the configuration files from gnome2 in a manner that likely makes them incompatible with gnome2. There are other configuration files in /home that I'd expect this to cause problems - at best I expect it to transition successfully from older to newer, but not shared back and forth.

As for booting, the default behavior of any distribution is to replace the existing boot loader. So whichever distro you installed last is the boot loader that will be used.


Chris Murphy